Marcel Stimberg
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mstimberg.bsky.social
Marcel Stimberg
@mstimberg.bsky.social
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Software Research Engineerin computational neuroscience | Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics (ISIR), @sorbonne-universite.fr‬ | Brian Developer | editor for @joss-openjournals.bsky.social | interested in open {source,science,education} | He/him
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Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
romainbrette.bsky.social
My book "The Brain, in Theory" on the publisher's website (out in April 2026):
press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...
The Brain, In Theory
Why engineering and computational analogies are poorly suited to the study of biological cognition
press.princeton.edu
November 18, 2025 at 8:25 AM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
jo.nny.rip
Hello #SfN2025, I'm here presenting sciop.net, archiving at-risk information and bootstrapping a hybrid federated/p2p archive, rebuilding NWB and integrating acquisition and analysis with lightweight pipelines.

I'll be at ZZ14 in the Monday afternoon session :)
aharoni-lab.com/sfn2025/sciop
SciOp - Public Information Preservation
Preserving Public Information
sciop.net
November 16, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
neural-reckoning.org
This is an absolutely delightful read that i strongly recommend for everyone in science.
November 15, 2025 at 3:13 PM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
joannabagniewska.com
For the Aussies, the zoologists and the architects out there.

💩🧊🧪

By @chazhutton.com
Wombat architecture critics. Two wombats see a cube-shaped house and one comments: Well that looks like shit.
November 14, 2025 at 5:39 PM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
With my great advisors and colleagues, @achterbrain.bsky.social @zhe @danakarca.bsky.social @neural-reckoning.org, we show that if heterogeneous axonal delays (imprecise) can capture the essential temporal structure of a task, spiking networks do not need precise synaptic weights to perform well.
November 13, 2025 at 8:51 PM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
ppjgoncalves.bsky.social
Super excited about this work led by the one and only @deismic.bsky.social!
November 13, 2025 at 4:07 PM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
chowleen.bsky.social
The room is
almost all
elephant.
Almost none
of it isn’t.
Pretty much
solid elephant.
So there’s no
room to talk
about it.

-Kay Ryan, “The Elephant in the Room”
#everynightapoem
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM Kay Ryan The room is almost all elephant. Almost none of it isn't. Pretty much solid elephant. So there's no room to talk about it.
November 13, 2025 at 12:13 AM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
djnicholson.bsky.social
My little book on Schrödinger's famous classic 'What Is Life?' is out! Offering the most comprehensive analysis ever undertaken of the book's origins, reception, impact, and legacy, it uncovers Schrödinger's motivations in writing it, and shows how it has shaped our current understanding of the cell
<i>What Is Life?</i> Revisited
Cambridge Core - Philosophy: General Interest - <i>What Is Life?</i> Revisited
www.cambridge.org
October 10, 2025 at 1:52 PM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
richarddmorey.bsky.social
"It’s ironic, of course, that much of the research driving our understanding of AI is produced by universities themselves."

Yeah, maybe think about that one for a minute...?
timeshighered.bsky.social Times Higher Education (THE) @timeshighered.bsky.social · 8d
Opinion: “It’s difficult to think of another sector that has so dismally failed to strategically engage with the transformative potential of information technology.”

🖊️ Ian Richardson #highered #EduSky
https://ow.ly/zXc850Xpvbu
November 11, 2025 at 8:36 AM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
neural-reckoning.org
Gonna be feeling this when Keir Starmer appoints an even more right wing director of the BBC.
jules.su Jules Suzdaltsev @jules.su · 8d
this is literally never not accurate
November 11, 2025 at 9:13 AM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
jules.su
this is literally never not accurate
November 10, 2025 at 6:32 PM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
neural-reckoning.org
Talks from #SNUFA 2025 are now available on YouTube:
youtube.com/playlist?lis...
🤖🧠🧪
SNUFA 2025 Workshop - YouTube
Spiking neural networks as universal function approximators (SNUFA) online workshop 2025. For more see http://snufa.net/2025/
youtube.com
November 7, 2025 at 4:59 PM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
devezer.bsky.social
We must change this mindset that the essential and most critical work in a field is always the first one. That distorted view has caused a lot of problems in psychological science already. The first work is just that—the start. Every field should be evaluated based on the complete body of evidence.
November 6, 2025 at 5:08 PM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
devezer.bsky.social
Reactions to the "debunking" of the original 1956 cognitive dissonance work baffles me. A whole area doesn't die just bec the first work is faulty. That's novelty bias & theory ownership in psych talking. Mendelian genetics did not die when Mendel's original results were found too good to be true.
November 6, 2025 at 5:08 PM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
mystmd.org
JupyterBook 2 is released! This is now built on top of the @mystmd.org engine directly.

🚀

Please reach out on our GitHub discussions if you have any problems upgrading.
November 3, 2025 at 2:31 PM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
batistaruan.bsky.social
"Spherical cows and bipedal goats: perspectives on mathematical models in biology". 13 and 14/11/2025 (Salle Jaurès, ENS-PSL, rue d'Ulm, Paris). More info about the event: montevil.org/talks/2025--...
November 1, 2025 at 7:50 AM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
neworderofjamie.bsky.social
If you're interested in doing a PhD at Sussex, lots of exciting PhD project ideas at www.sussex.ac.uk/research/cen... including several Spiking Neural Network projects with myself and @drtnowotny.bsky.social . Funding available via www.sussex.ac.uk/study/fees-f... or www.sussex.ac.uk/study/fees-f...
Project suggestions : Sussex AI PhD Programme : ... : AI Research Group : University of Sussex
www.sussex.ac.uk
October 31, 2025 at 1:12 PM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
earthmover.io
Today, napari users can’t fully leverage Xarray’s labeled metadata, as slider names, units & dimensions often get out of sync. That’s changing. At SciPy 2025, napari, Xarray & CellProfiler devs began a collab to build true metadata-aware visualization across sciences.
earthmover.io/blog/scienti...
Scientific Data Visualization with Xarray and Napari - Earthmover
Ian Hunt-Isaak Xarray Community Developer Tim Monko Neuroscience PhD & napari community manager This blog was also published on the xarray blog and the napari blog. TL;DR Making Napari and Xarray work...
earthmover.io
October 29, 2025 at 5:53 PM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
python.org
TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-...
🧵
The official home of the Python Programming Language
www.python.org
October 27, 2025 at 2:47 PM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
simonwillison.net
This was a tough but necessary decision - I posted my own notes on this here, from the perspective of a current PSF board member simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/27/...
October 27, 2025 at 8:34 PM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
neural-reckoning.org
Spiking NN fans - the #SNUFA workshop (Nov 5-6) agenda is finalised and online now. Make sure to register (free) soon. (Note you can register for either day and come to both.)

Agenda: snufa.net/2025/
Registration: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/snufa-2025...

Thanks to all who voted on abstracts!

🤖🧠🧪
SNUFA 2025
Spiking Neural networks as Universal Function Approximators
snufa.net
October 23, 2025 at 4:17 PM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
neworderofjamie.bsky.social
My 1st PhD student Anindya Ghosh has a great new paper out in PLOS comp bio. We combine hoverfly recordings with modelling to show how target motion and optic-flow sensitive neuron outputs are combined together to generate behaviourally relevant sensorimotor responses.

doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Understanding the mechanism of facilitation in hoverfly TSDNs
Author summary Many human sports, including tennis, football, and basketball, rely on the ability to visually detect and respond to the motion of a small, rapidly moving object. Indeed, some sports st...
doi.org
October 22, 2025 at 8:31 AM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
parskatt.bsky.social
October 23, 2025 at 6:05 AM
Reposted by Marcel Stimberg
mystmd.org
🚨 New paper! The @jupyterbook.org team just published a peer-reviewed paper in the SciPy Proceedings describing the design & architecture of Jupyter Book 2 and the MyST Document Engine!

📝 blog post: blog.jupyterbook.org/posts/2025-j...
📄 paper: proceedings.scipy.org/articles/hwc...
Jupyter Book 2 and the MyST Document Stack - SciPy Proceedings
Jupyter Book allows researchers and educators to create books and knowledge bases that are reusable, reproducible, and interactive. This new foundation introduces a scalable way to publish…
proceedings.scipy.org
October 22, 2025 at 2:06 PM